Saint_clark

How did that random lad we signed on loan from Goztepe turn out in the end?

Lavia had signed a 5 year deal the summer before, Dibling only has one season left on his contract. Lavia was also consistently playing at a high standard, Dibling has fallen off a cliff.

Buffon Lahm Ferdinand Maldini Cole Pirlo Keane Messi Ronaldinho Henry Rooney I know a lot of people will scoff at my up front pick but under Fergie Rooney was an unreal talent. Definitely faded off in a big way at the end.

We don't need to reinvent the wheel here. He's performed well at centreback in the league we're about to play in. Plenty of centrebacks have done well without being the tallest.

Can't watch it as i'm currently at work but if he's promoting non-league football, I can't echo that enough. Last 5 years or so i've gone to watch my partners team Dorchester and it's been much more enjoyable than it ever is going to watch Saints now. Reasonable prices, everyone knows each other, pints on the terraces, players in the bar after the game, it's great.

If we'd signed him for £10million less it wouldn't have been so bad. £18million of our budget though was insane. I said at the time that his role was one that could be filled by someone much cheaper, whereas that £18million added to our budget for a centre forward would have made a huge difference.

Yeah can we just lock this thread please? Anything that needs to be discussed in relation to him will fit into another thread now whether it be the transfer window thread or the defectors thread.

I don't think Downes was ever anything above a tidy midfielder in the championship which is why I was vehemently against us signing him last summer, especially for the amount we did, and got shouted down for it. I know he had a 93% success pass rate but consider the style of play under Martin and that isn't that impressive. The two centrebacks for us were the same, the side was literally set up to allow Martin to wank over most of his backline having 90%+ passing stats.

They don't just say "yeah that's roughly the same". They categorise chances based on the location of the shooter, strong/weak foot, ball in motion or stationary, player in motion or stationary... there's dozens and dozens of factors. I'm not even that big on the stat but a hell of a lot of research, statistical analysis and hard work has gone into developing it. It's not just a few blokes sitting in front of a TV saying "that looked a bit like that shot Haaland scored the other week".

Whitey how many times FFS 😂 that is NOT. WHAT. HAPPENS. XG isn't an individuals belief of whether or not a chance SHOULD be scored. It's a representation of how often the chance HAS been scored in the past. Every single one of us would look at a player running past the keeper, 6 yards out on his stronger foot with an empty net and say "he should score". But those chances don't give 1 xG, in fact no chances give 1 xG. Why? Because it's based not on whether someone SHOULD score, but how often it HAS been scored. And people have missed those chances in the past.

What do you use now? I haven't been able to find Southampton's kits on DHGate for a few years.

The fact that you think XG should line up perfectly with the amount of goals scored shows why you don't understand it, but ironically the reason why this happens has already been presented by someone who you agree with. Let's say Saints are playing with Shane Long up top. He goes through on goal one on one with the keeper 10 times and misses all of them, including one moment where he goes round the keeper and has an empty net but hits the crossbar. Our XG would be quite high based off of those chances but our goals scored low (or nil) because his finishing is shit - but lots of players through history have regularly finished those chances. Our opposition on that day, City, have De Bruyne playing for them and he curls in a hattrick of long range screamers from angles and distances that players more often than not miss from. Other than that they don't create any other chances. The game ends up 3-0 to City but with us having a higher XG.

Indeed, but XG by itself isn't used as a tool to measure a player's finishing ability. Of course the same chance presented to Long and to Haaland would result in two different outcomes, but the stat measures the likelihood that the specific situation resulted in a goal, regardless of who was taking the shot. The way you then apply that to a player's finishing is you compare their actual goals scored to their XG. Shane Long as an example you used, his goals scored would be much lower than his XG throughout his career as he would miss a lot of chances that lots of other strikers would finish. And in the case of this thread the way you apply it to judging a keeper is whether their XG faced is higher or lower than goals conceded. In the Prem Bazunu ended up conceding something like 18 goals more than the stats would have predicted him to - which has one of two explanations. Either Bazunu faced significantly more world class, unstoppable shots than any other keeper on the league whilst our defence simultaneously gave away very few easy chances, or he let in more chances that should have been saved than any other keeper in the league.

🤦🏼‍♂️

So you agree we should have kept him and would be better having him in our team now? 😉

Yeah, any argument against Alcaraz falls down when you consider we played Smallbone instead the last two seasons.

2 goals and 3 assists in 763 minutes on the pitch. Far better return per minute played than anyone in our squad.

It's absolutely not, how many times do we need to go through this. They calculate the likelihood of a chance being scored based on how many times similar chances have been scored throughout the past. Nothing to do with whether you or I or Bob Statman thinks it should be scored. It's why a penalty isn't 1xg, because although we all think they SHOULD score, plenty of them are missed.

I'm prepared to give them a chance but how many different recruitment set ups are allowed to fail before the people setting them up need to change?

I don't really feel any affection for Dibling i've got to be honest, so they can claim what they want.

It means he conceded more goals that keepers would generally be expected to save than any other keeper in the league.

If a player doing well at Goztepe (Romulo) is considered unrealistic for us then you have to seriously question what it is we're getting out of the partnership. Surely them getting cheap loans from us is contingent on any successful players for them signing for us before going elsewhere.

Yeah the atmosphere got proper nasty in that game. Drop ball after the game stopped for an injury and he tried to boot it into the empty net while the keeper was down in the fullback position waiting for it to be rolled back. I vaguely remember someone grabbing him by the throat and the referee luckily missing it.

That Fuller goal was definitely Millwall. I remember him basically giving a big "fuck you" to the fans in his celebration as he'd been subject to abuse all season.